Economic Death Spiral at the Pentagon

by Chalmers Johnson and Tom Engelhardt

Recently, reviewing
lobbying disclosure reports, the Washington Times discovered "that 18
of the top 20 recipients of federal bailout money spent a combined $12.2 million
lobbying the White House, the Treasury Department, Congress, and federal agencies
during the last quarter of 2008." Citibank alone, according to the New York
Times, fielded
"an army of Washington lobbyists," plunking down $1.77 million in lobbying
fees just in the fourth quarter of last year.

And it isn't only sinking financial institutions begging for federal dollars
that have bolstered their Washington lobbying corps. So have the biggest U.S.
armaments companies  "drastically," according to reporter August
Cole of the Wall Street Journal. In 2008, he found, Northrop Grumman
almost doubled its lobbying budget to $20.6 million (from $10.9 million the
previous year); Boeing upped its budget from $10.6 million to $16.6 million
in the same period; and Lockheed-Martin, the company that received the most
contracts from the Pentagon last year, hiked its lobbying efforts by a whopping
54 percent in 2008.

If you want to get a taste of what that means, then click here
to view an ad for that company's potentially embattled boondoggle, the F-22,
the most expensive jet fighter ever built. What you'll discover is not just
that it will "protect" 300 million people  that's you, if you live in the
USA  but that it will also employ 95,000 of us. In other words, the ad's threatening
message implies, if the Obama administration cuts this program in bad times,
it will throw another 95,000 Americans out on the street. Now that's effective
lobbying for you, especially when you consider, as Chalmers Johnson does below,
that for any imaginable war the U.S. might fight in the coming decades, the
F-22 will be a thoroughly useless plane.

We don't usually think of the Pentagon as a jobs-and-careers scam operation,
a kind of Mega-Madoff Ponzi scheme that goes BOOM!, though it is clearly designed
for the well-being of defense contractors, military officers, and congressional
representatives; nor do we usually consider the "defense" budget as a giant
make-work jobs racket, as arms experts Bill Hartung and Christopher Preble
recently
suggested, but it's never too late.

Chalmers Johnson, author of the already-classic Blowback Trilogy,
including most recently Nemesis:
The Last Days of the American Republic, makes vividly clear just how
little the Pentagon is organized to consider the actual defense needs of the
United States. In many ways, it remains a deadly organization of boys with
toys that now poses a distinct economic danger to the rest of us. (Check out,
as well, a TomDispatch audio interview with Johnson on the Pentagon's economic
death spiral by clicking here).
Tom

The Looming Crisis at the Pentagon

How taxpayers finance fantasy wars
by Chalmers Johnson

Like much of the rest of the world, Americans
know that the U.S. automotive industry is in the grips of what may be a fatal
decline. Unless it receives emergency financing and undergoes significant
reform, it is undoubtedly headed for the graveyard in which many American industries
are already buried, including those that made televisions and other consumer
electronics, many types of scientific and medical equipment, machine tools,
textiles, and much earth-moving equipment  and that's to name only the most
obvious candidates. They all lost their competitiveness to newly emerging economies
that were able to outpace them in innovative design, price, quality, service,
and fuel economy, among other things.

A similar, if far less well known, crisis exists when it comes to the military-industrial
complex. That crisis has its roots in the corrupt and deceitful practices that
have long characterized the high command of the armed forces, civilian executives
of the armaments industries, and congressional opportunists and criminals looking
for pork-barrel projects, defense installations for their districts, or even
bribes for votes.

Given our economic crisis, the estimated
trillion dollars we spend each year on the military and its weaponry
is simply unsustainable. Even if present fiscal constraints no longer existed,
we would still have misspent too much of our tax revenues on too few, overly
expensive, overly complex weapons systems that leave us ill-prepared to defend
the country in a real military emergency. We face a double crisis at the
Pentagon: we can no longer afford the pretense of being the Earth's sole
superpower, and we cannot afford to perpetuate a system in which the military-industrial
complex makes its fortune off inferior, poorly designed weapons.

Double Crisis at the Pentagon

This self-destructive system of bloated budgets and purchases of the wrong
weapons has persisted for so long thanks to the aura of invincibility surrounding
the armed forces and a mistaken belief that jobs in the arms industry are as
valuable to the economy as jobs in the civilian sector.

Recently, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen began
to advocate
nothing less than protecting the Pentagon budget by pegging defense spending
to a fixed percentage of gross domestic product (GDP, the total value of
goods and services produced by the economy). This would, of course, mean
simply throwing out serious strategic analysis of what is actually needed
for national defense. Mullen wants, instead, to raise the annual defense
budget in the worst of times to at least 4 percent of GDP. Such a policy is clearly
designed to deceive the public about ludicrously wasteful spending on weapons
systems which has gone on for decades.

It is hard to imagine any sector of the American economy more driven by
ideology, delusion, and propaganda than the armed services. Many people believe
that our military is the largest, best equipped, and most invincible among
the world's armed forces. None of these things is true, but our military
is, without a doubt, the most expensive to maintain. Each year, we Americans
account for nearly half
of all global military spending, an amount larger than the next 45 nations
together spend on their militaries annually.

Equally striking, the military seems increasingly ill-adapted to the types
of wars that Pentagon strategists agree the United States is most likely
to fight in the future, and is, in fact, already fighting in Afghanistan
 insurgencies led by non-state actors. While the Department of Defense produces
weaponry meant for such wars, it is also squandering staggering levels of
defense appropriations on aircraft, ships, and futuristic weapons systems
that fascinate generals and admirals, and are beloved by military contractors
mainly because their complexity runs up their cost to astronomical levels.

That most of these will actually prove irrelevant to the world in which
we live matters not a whit to their makers or purchasers. Thought of another
way, the stressed out American taxpayer, already supporting two disastrous
wars and the weapons systems that go with them, is also paying good money
for weapons that are meant for fantasy wars, for wars that will only be fought
in the battlescapes and war-gaming imaginations of Defense Department "planners."

The Air Force and the Army are still planning as if, in the reasonably near
future, they were going to fight an old-fashioned war of attrition against
the Soviet Union, which disappeared in 1991; while the Navy, with its 11 large
aircraft-carrier battle groups, is, as William S. Lind has written, "still
structured to fight the Imperial Japanese Navy." Lind, a prominent theorist
of so-called fourth-generation warfare (insurgencies carried out by groups
such as al-Qaeda), argues that "the Navy's aircraft-carrier battle groups have
cruised on mindlessly for more than half a century, waiting for those Japanese
carriers to turn up. They are still cruising today, into, if not beyond, irrelevance.
Submarines
are today's and tomorrow's capital ships; the ships that most directly determine
control of blue waters."

In
December 2008, Franklin "Chuck" Spinney, a former high-ranking civilian in
the Pentagon's Office of Systems Analysis (set up in 1961 to make independent
evaluations of Pentagon policy) and a charter member of the "Fighter Mafia"
of the 1980s and 1990s, wrote,
"As has been documented for at least 20 years, patterns of repetitive habitual
behavior in the Pentagon have created a self-destructive decision-making process.
This process has produced a death spiral."

As a result, concluded Spinney, inadequate amounts of wildly overpriced
equipment are purchased, "new weapons [that] do not replace old ones on a
one for one basis." There is also "continual pressure to reduce combat readiness,"
a "corrupt accounting system" that "makes it impossible to sort out the priorities,"
and a readiness to believe that old solutions will work for the current crisis.

Failed Reform Efforts

There's no great mystery about the causes of the deep dysfunction that has
long characterized the Pentagon's weapons procurement system. In 2006, Thomas
Christie, former head of Operational Test and Evaluation, the most senior
official at the Department of Defense for testing weapons and a Pentagon
veteran of half a century, detailed
more than 35 years of efforts to reform the weapons acquisition system. These
included the 1971 Fitzhugh (or Blue Ribbon) Commission, the 1977 Steadman
Review, the 1981 Carlucci Acquisition Initiatives, the 1986 Packard Commission,
the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act, the
1989 Defense Management Review, the 1990 "Streamlining Review" of the Defense
Science Board, the 1993-1994 report of the Acquisition Streamlining Task
Force and of the Defense Science Board, the late 1990s Total System Performance
Responsibility initiative of the Air Force, and the Capabilities-Based Acquisition
approach of the Missile Defense Agency of the first years of this century.

Christie concluded: "After all these years of repeated reform efforts, major
defense programs are taking 20 to 30 years to deliver less capability than
planned, very often at two to three times the costs and schedules planned."
He also added the following observations:

"Launching into major developments without understanding key technical
issues is the root cause of major cost and schedule problems. Costs, schedules,
and technical risks are often grossly understated at the outset. There are
more acquisition programs being pursued than DoD [the Department of Defense]
can possibly afford in the long term

"By the time these problems are acknowledged, the political penalties incurred
in enforcing any major restructuring of a program, much less its cancellation,
are too painful to bear. Unless someone is willing to stand up and point out
that the emperor has no clothes, the U.S. military will continue to hemorrhage
taxpayer dollars and critical years while acquiring equipment that falls short
of meeting the needs of troops in the field."

The inevitable day of reckoning, long predicted by Pentagon critics, has,
I believe, finally arrived. Our problems are those of a very rich country
which has become accustomed over the years to defense budgets that are actually
jobs programs and also a major source of pork for the use of politicians
in their reelection campaigns.

Given the present major recession, whose depths remain unknown, the United
States has better things to spend its money on than Nimitz-class aircraft carriers
at a price of $6.2 billion each (the cost of the USS George H. W. Bush,
launched in January 2009, our 10th such ship) or aircraft that can cruise at
a speed of Mach 2 (1,352 miles per hour).

However, don't wait for the Pentagon to sort out such matters. If it has proven
one thing over the last decades, it's that it is thoroughly incapable of reforming
itself. According to Christie, "Over the past 20 or so years, the DoD and its
components have deliberately and systematically decimated their in-house technical
capabilities to the point where there is little, if any, competence or initiative
left in the various organizations tasked with planning and executing its budget
and acquisition programs."

Gunning for the Air Force

President Obama has almost certainly retained Robert M. Gates as secretary
of defense in part to give himself some bipartisan cover as he tries to come
to grips with the bloated defense budget. Gates is also sympathetic to the
desire of a few reformers in the Pentagon to dump the Lockheed-Martin F-22
"Raptor" supersonic stealth fighter, a plane designed to meet the Soviet Union's
last proposed, but never built, interceptor.

The Air Force's old guard and its allies in Congress are already fighting
back aggressively. In June 2008, Gates fired Secretary of the Air Force Michael
W. Wynne and Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. T. Michael Moseley. Though he was
undoubtedly responding to their fervent support for the F-22, his cover explanation
was their visible failure to adequately supervise the accounting and control
of nuclear weapons.

In 2006, the Air Force had managed to ship to Taiwan four high-tech nose
cone fuses for Minutemen ICBM warheads instead of promised helicopter batteries,
an error that went blissfully undetected until March 2008. Then, in August
2007, a B-52 bomber carrying six armed nuclear cruise missiles flew across
much of the country from Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota to Barksdale
Air Force Base in Louisiana. This was in direct violation of standing orders
against such flights over the United States.

As Julian Barnes and Peter Spiegel of the Los Angeles Timesnoted
in June 2008, "Tensions between the Air Force and Gates have been growing
for months," mainly over Gates' frustration about the F-22 and his inability
to get the Air Force to deploy more pilotless aircraft to the various war
zones. They were certainly not improved when Wynne, a former senior vice
president of General Dynamics, went out of his way to cross Gates, arguing
publicly that "any president would be damn happy to have more F-22s around
if we had to get into a fight with China." It catches something of the power
of the military-industrial complex that, despite his clear desire on the
subject, Gates has not yet found the nerve  or the political backing  to
pull
the plug on the F-22; nor has he even dared to bring up the subject of
canceling its more expensive and technically complicated successor, the F-35
"Joint Strike Fighter."

More than 20 years ago, Chuck Spinney wrote a classic account of the now-routine
bureaucratic scams practiced within the Pentagon to ensure that Congress
will appropriate funds for dishonestly advertised and promoted weapons systems
and then prevent their cancellation when the fraud comes to light. In a paper
he entitled "Defense
Power Games," of which his superiors deeply disapproved, Spinney outlined
two crucial Pentagon gambits meant to lock in such weaponry: "front-loading"
and "political engineering."

It should be understood at the outset that all actors involved, including
the military officers in charge of projects, the members of Congress who
use defense appropriations to buy votes within their districts, and the contractors
who live off the ensuing lucrative contracts, utilize these two scams. It
is also important to understand that neither front-loading nor political
engineering is an innocent or morally neutral maneuver. They both involve
criminal intent to turn on the spigot of taxpayer money and then to jam it
so that it cannot be turned off. They are de rigueur practices of
our military-industrial complex.

Front-loading is the practice of appropriating funds for a new weapons project
based solely on assurances by its official sponsors about what it can do. This
happens long before a prototype has been built or tested, and it invariably
involves the quoting of unrealistically low unit costs for a sizable order.
Assurances are always given that the system's technical requirements will be
simple or have already been met. Low-balling future costs, an intrinsic aspect
of front-loading, is an old Defense Department trick, a governmental version
of bait-and-switch. (What is introduced as a great bargain regularly turns
out to be a grossly expensive lemon.)

Political engineering is the strategy of awarding contracts in as many different
congressional districts as possible. By making voters and congressional incumbents
dependent on military money, the Pentagon's political engineers put pressure
on them to continue supporting front-loaded programs even after their true
costs become apparent.

Front-loading and political engineering generate several typical features
in the weapons that the Pentagon then buys for its arsenal. These continually
prove unnecessarily expensive, are prone to break down easily, and are often
unworkably complex. They tend to come with inadequate supplies of spare parts
and ammunition, since there is not enough money to buy the numbers that are
needed. They also force the services to repair older weapons and keep them
in service much longer than is normal or wise. (For example, the B-52 bomber,
which went into service in 1955, is still on active duty.)

Even though extended training would seem to be a necessary corollary of
the complexity of such weapons systems, the excessive cost actually leads
to reductions in training time for pilots and others. In the long run, it
is because of such expedients and short-term fixes that American casualties
may increase and, sooner or later, battles or wars may be lost.

For example, Northrop-Grumman's much touted B-2 stealth bomber has proven
to be almost totally worthless. It is too delicate to deploy to harsh climates
without special hangars first being built to protect it at ridiculous expense;
it cannot fulfill any combat missions that older designs were not fully adequate
to perform; and  at a total cost of $44.75 billion for only 21 bombers 
it wastes resources needed for real combat situations.

Instead, in military terms, the most unexpectedly successful post-Vietnam
aircraft has been the Fairchild A-10, unflatteringly nicknamed the "Warthog."
It is the only close-support aircraft ever developed by the U.S. Air Force.
Its task is to loiter over battlefields and assist ground forces in disposing
of obstinate or formidable targets, which is not something that fits comfortably
with the Air Force's hotshot self-image.

Some 715 A-10s were produced, and they served with great effectiveness in
the first Persian Gulf War. All 715 cumulatively cost less than three B-2 bombers.
The A-10 is now out of production because the Air Force establishment favors
extremely fast aircraft that fly in straight lines at high altitudes rather
than aircraft that are useful in battle. In the Afghan war, the Air Force has
regularly inflicted heavy casualties on innocent civilians at least in part
because it tries to attack ground targets from the air with inappropriately
high-performance equipment.

Using the F-22 to Fight the F-16

The military-industrial complex is today so confident of its skills in gaming
the system that it does not hesitate to publicize how many workers in a particular
district will lose their jobs if a particular project is canceled. Threats
are also made  and put into effect  to withhold political contributions
from uncooperative congressional representatives.

As Spinney recalls, "In July 1989, when some members of Congress began to
build a coalition aimed at canceling the B-2, Northrop Corporation, the B-2's
prime contractor, retaliated by releasing data which had previously been
classified showing that tens of thousands of jobs and hundreds of millions
in profits were at risk in 46 states and 383 congressional districts." The
B-2 was not canceled.

Southern California's biggest private employers are Boeing Corporation and
Northrop-Grumman. They are
said to employ more than 58,000 workers in well-paying jobs, a major
political obstacle to rationalizing defense expenditures even as recession
is making such steps all but unavoidable.

Both front-loading and political engineering are alive and well in 2009.
They are, in fact, now at the center of fierce controversies surrounding
the extreme age of the present fleet of Air Force fighter aircraft, most
of which date from the 1980s. Meanwhile the costs of the two most likely
successors to the workhorse F-16  the F-22 Raptor and the F-35 Joint Strike
Fighter  have run up so high that the government cannot afford to purchase
significant numbers of either or them.

The F-16 made its first flight in December 1976, and a total of 4,400 have
been built. They have been sold, or given away, all over the world. Planning
for the F-22 began in 1986, when the Cold War was still alive (even if on
life support), and the Air Force was trumpeting its fears that the other
superpower, the USSR, was planning a new, ultra-fast, highly maneuverable
fighter.

By the time the prototype F-22 had its roll-out on May 11, 1997, the Cold
War was nearly a decade in its grave, and it was perfectly apparent that
the Soviet aircraft it was intended to match would never be built. Lockheed
Martin, the F-22's prime contractor, naturally argued that we needed it anyway
and made plans to sell some 438 airplanes for a total tab of $70 billion.
By mid-2008, only 183 F-22s were on order, 122 of which had been delivered.
The numbers had been reduced due to cost overruns. The Air Force still wants
to buy an additional
198 planes, but Secretary Gates and his leading assistants have balked.
No wonder. According
to arms experts Bill Hartung and Christopher Preble, at more than $350
million each, the F-22 is "the most expensive fighter plane ever built."

The F-22 has several strikingly expensive characteristics which actually
limit its usefulness. It is allegedly a stealth fighter  that is, an airplane
with a shape that reduces its visibility on radar  but there is no such
thing as an airplane completely invisible to all radar. In any case, once
it turns on its own fire-control radar, which it must do in combat, it becomes
fully visible to an enemy.

The F-22 is able to maneuver at very high altitudes, but this is of limited
value since there are no other airplanes in service anywhere that can engage
in combat at such heights. It can cruise at twice the speed of sound in level
flight without the use of its afterburners (which consume fuel at an accelerated
rate), but there are no potential adversaries for which these capabilities
are relevant. The plane is obviously blindingly irrelevant to "fourth-generation
wars" like that with the Taliban in Afghanistan  the sorts of conflicts
for which American strategists inside the Pentagon and out believe the United
States should be preparing.

Actually, the U.S. ought not to be engaged in fourth-generation wars at
all, whatever planes are in its fleet. Outside powers normally find such
wars unwinnable, as the history of Afghanistan, that "graveyard of empires"
going back to Alexander the Great, illustrates so well. Unfortunately, President
Obama's approach to the Bush administration's Afghan War remains deeply flawed
and will only entrap us in another quagmire, whatever planes we put in the
skies over that country.

Nonetheless, the F-22 is still being promoted as the plane to buy almost
entirely through front-loading and political engineering. Some apologists
for the Air Force also claim
that we need the F-22 to face the F-16. Their argument goes this way: We
have sold so many F-16s to allies and Third World customers that, if we ever
had to fight one of them, that country might prevail using our own equipment
against us. Some foreign air forces like Israel's are fully equipped with
F-16s and their pilots actually receive more training and monthly practice
hours than ours do.

This, however, seems a trivial reason for funding more F-22s. We should
instead simply not get involved in wars with former allies we have armed,
although this is why Congress prohibited Lockheed from selling the F-22 abroad.
Some Pentagon critics contend that the Air Force and prime contractors lobby
for arms sales abroad because they artificially generate a demand for new
weapons at home that are "better" than the ones we've sold elsewhere.

Thanks to political engineering, the F-22 has parts suppliers in 44 states,
and some 25,000 people have well-paying jobs building it. Lockheed Martin
and some in the Defense Department have therefore proposed that, if the F-22
is canceled, it should be replaced by the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, also
built by Lockheed Martin.

Most serious observers believe that this would only make a bad situation worse.
So far the F-35 shows every sign of being, in Chuck Spinney's words, "a far
more costly and more troubled turkey" than the F-22, "even though it has a
distinction that even the F-22 cannot claim, namely it is tailored to meet
the same threat that ceased to exist at least three years before the F-35
R&D [research and development] program began in 1994."

The F-35 is considerably more complex than the F-22, meaning that it will
undoubtedly be even more expensive to repair and will break down even more
easily. Its cost per plane is guaranteed to continue to spiral upward. The
design of the F-22 involves 4 million lines of computer code; the F-35, 19
million lines. The Pentagon sold the F-35 to Congress in 1998 with the promise
of a unit cost of $184 million per aircraft. By 2008, that had risen to $355
million per aircraft and the plane was already two years behind schedule.

According to Pierre M. Sprey, one of the original sponsors of the F-16,
and Winslow T. Wheeler, a 31-year veteran staff official on Senate defense
committees, the F-35 is
overweight, underpowered, and "less maneuverable than the appallingly
vulnerable F-105 'lead sled' that got wiped out over North Vietnam in the
Indochina War." Its makers claim that it will be a bomber as well as a fighter,
but it will have a payload of only two 2,000-pound bombs, far less than American
fighters of the Vietnam era. Although the Air Force praises its stealth features,
it will lose these as soon as it mounts bombs under its wings, which will
alter its shape most un-stealthily.

It is a non-starter for close-air-support missions because it is too fast
for a pilot to be able to spot tactical targets. It is too delicate and potentially
flammable to be able to withstand ground fire. If built, it will end up as
the most expensive defense contract in history without offering a serious
replacement for any of the fighters or fighter-bombers currently in service.

The Fighter Mafia

Every branch of the American armed forces suffers from similar "defense
power games." For example, the new Virginia-class fast-attack submarines
are expensive and not needed. As the New York Timeswrote
editorially, "The program is little more than a public works project
to keep the Newport News, Va., and Groton, Conn., naval shipyards in business."

I have, however, concentrated on the Air Force because the collapse of internal
controls over acquisitions is most obvious, as well as farthest advanced,
there  and because the Air Force has a history of conflict over going along
with politically easy decisions that was recently hailed by Secretary of
Defense Gates as deserving of emulation by the other services. The pointed
attack Gates launched on bureaucratism was, paradoxically, one of the few
optimistic developments in Pentagon politics in recent times.

On April 21, 2008, the secretary of defense caused a storm of controversy
by giving
a speech to the officers of the Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base,
Alabama. In it, he singled out for praise and emulation an Air Force officer
who had inspired many of that service's innovators over the past couple of
generations, while being truly despised by an establishment and an old guard
who viewed him as an open threat to careerism.

Col. John Boyd (1927-1997) was a significant military strategist, an exceptionally
talented fighter pilot in both the Korean and Vietnamese war eras, and for
six years the chief instructor at the Fighter Weapons School at Nellis Air
Force Base in Las Vegas. "Forty-Second Boyd" became a legend in the Air Force
because of his standing claim that he could defeat any pilot, foreign or domestic,
in simulated air-to-air combat within 40 seconds, a bet he never lost even
though he was continuously challenged.

Last April, Gates said, in part:

"As this new era continues to unfold before us, the challenge I pose to
you today is to become a forward-thinking officer who helps the Air Force adapt
to a constantly changing strategic environment characterized by persistent
conflict.

"Let me illustrate by using a historical exemplar: the late Air Force Colonel
John Boyd. As a 30-year-old captain, he rewrote the manual for air-to-air combat.
Boyd and the reformers he inspired would later go on to design and advocate
for the F-16 and the A-10. After retiring, he would develop the principals
of maneuver warfare that were credited by a former Marine Corps commandant
[General Charles C. Krulak] and a secretary of defense [Dick Cheney] for the
lightning victory of the first Gulf War .

"In accomplishing all these things, Boyd  a brilliant, eccentric, and
stubborn character  had to overcome a large measure of bureaucratic resistance
and institutional hostility. He had some advice that he used to pass on to
his colleagues and subordinates that is worth sharing with you. Boyd would
say, and I quote: 'One day you will take a fork in the road, and you're going
to have to make a decision about which direction you want to go. If you go
one way, you can be somebody. You will have to make compromises and you will
have to turn your back on your friends. But you will be a member of the club
and you will get promoted and get good assignments. Or you can go the other
way and you can do something  something for your country and for your Air
Force and for yourself. If you decide to do something, you may not get promoted
and get good assignments and you certainly will not be a favorite of your superiors.
But you won't have to compromise yourself. To be somebody or to do something.
In life there is often a roll call. That's when you have to make a decision.
To be or to do.' We must heed John Boyd's advice by asking if the ways we
do business make sense."

Boyd's many accomplishments are documented in Robert Coram's excellent biography,
Boyd:
The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War. They need not be retold
here. It was, however, the spirit of Boyd and "the reformers he inspired,"
a group within Air Force headquarters who came to be called the "Fighter Mafia,"
that launched the defense reform movement of the 1980s and 1990s. Their objectives
were to stop the acquisition of unnecessarily complex and expensive weapons,
cause the Air Force to take seriously the idea of a fourth generation of warfare,
end its reliance on a strategy of attrition, and expose to criticism an officer's
corps focused on careerist standards.

Unless Secretary Gates succeeds in reviving it, their lingering influence
in the Pentagon is just about exhausted today. We await the leadership of
the Obama administration to see which way the Air Force and the rest of the
American defense establishment evolves.

Despite Gates' praise of Boyd, one should not underestimate the formidable
obstacles to Pentagon reform. Over a quarter-century ago, back in 1982, journalist
James Fallows outlined the most serious structural obstacle to any genuine
reform in his National Book Award-winning study, National
Defense. The book was so influential that at least one commentator
includes Fallows as a non-Pentagon member of Boyd's "Fighter Mafia."

As Fallows then observed (pp. 64-65):

"The culture of procurement teaches officers that there are two paths to
personal survival. One is to bring home the bacon for the service as the manager
of a program that gets its full funding. 'Procurement management is more and
more the surest path to advancement' within the military, says John Morse,
who retired as a Navy captain after 28 years in the service .

"The other path that procurement opens leads outside the military, toward
the contracting firms. To know even a handful of professional soldiers above
the age of 40 and the rank of major is to keep hearing, in the usual catalogue
of life changes, that many have resigned from the service and gone to the contractors:
to Martin Marietta, Northrop, Lockheed, to the scores of consulting firms and
middlemen, whose offices fill the skyscrapers of Rosslyn, Virginia, across
the river from the capital. In 1959, Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois reported
that 768 retired senior officers (generals, admirals, colonels, and Navy captains)
worked for defense contractors. Ten years later Senator William Proxmire of
Wisconsin said that the number had increased to 2,072."

Almost 30 years after those words were written, the situation has grown
far worse. Until we decide (or are forced) to dismantle
our empire, sell off
most of our 761 military bases (according to official statistics for fiscal
year 2008) in other people's countries, and bring our military expenditures
into line with those of the rest of the world, we are destined to go bankrupt
in the name of national defense. As of this moment, we are well on our way,
which is why the Obama administration will face such critical  and difficult
 decisions when it comes to the Pentagon budget.